Comic Creator Spotlight on Sean McKeever: "I Went Off and Found My Voice"
For Free Comic Book Day we chat with Austin's sequential standouts
By Richard Whittaker, Fri., May 5, 2023
Essential bibliography: The Waiting Place (SLG Publishing); Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane (Marvel); Teen Titans (DC); Outpost Zero (Skybound)
First Comic: “Spider-Man 148, which was toward the end of the original Clone Saga where Spider-Man was fighting his cloned twin that the Jackal had created. I’m 3 years old at the time so it’s all just kind of neat to me.”
Currently working on: “A AAA science-fiction RPG for consoles and PC, and comicswise, I’ve got a couple more Marvel digital projects coming out in the summer, but other than that I’m using my non-video game time to develop a series that I’m hoping to pitch to publishers later this year.”
“I’m a college dropout, I’m living at home, I’m running a 250-foot comic store in my parent’s hardware and sporting goods store [and] I realized, Marvel’s never going to just hire me to write Spider-Man or X-Men [so] I looked around at Strangers in Paradise and Stray Bullets and Hate, and I was influenced by Seinfeld and ER, and I went, ‘I just want to write normal people in normal situations, but have it be authentic and dramatic,’ and I had a whole lot to say about growing up in a tourist town. So I created this whole fictional tableau around my house, and that was where The Waiting Place came from. … It sold maybe a thousand copies an issue, but one of those people reading it was [Marvel editor Tom Breevort], and that’s how I got started at Marvel, writing The Incredible Hulk of all things. But it was because I went off and found my voice through The Waiting Place.
“[I’m proudest of] Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. I look back at that and thinking, ‘My god, I am writing The Waiting Place for Marvel, basically.’ My latest series, Outpost Zero, that’s one I’m really proud of. It was basically one big therapy session of me working through depression and anxiety in a science-fiction setting. At first, when I was developing it, I described it as, ‘The Waiting Place in space,’ and that one, I hope it stands the test of time.”
